


crooked dick empire, the jon lovett story

by kenopsia (indie)



Series: crooked media, porn empire [1]
Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: M/M, also all of the interns are writers, and have the same amount of cute insta content, and they focus on creating a more wholesome, cause you cant have an intern in a porn au, fuller spectrum of sex, in that crooked media is a porn empire, it makes you feel weird, porn au, take it from me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-21 18:17:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17048204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: Lovett: So Fairchild might have laughed at me and I might have quitLovett: Which is fine because obviously I do not give a fuckLovett: Except that I am obviously deeply humiliated and require praise for everything i’ve ever doneNow with coda.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakingwosound (sev313)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sev313/gifts).



> Now that Yule reveals are over I can say that this fic WOULD NOT EXIST had Laliandra and FormerlyDF not been present to egg me on and all of the interesting ideas here probably came from them. Also to anyone who wants to write porn empire AU fic, feel free to get on in there. y the people. 
> 
> This fic ALSO definitely would not exist without Dasyatidae who is 1) a damn delight and 2) the kind of person you can trust to fix a document in a way that lets you hit check marks all the way down which is such a stress reliever I cannot even tell you. Also thank you for letting me send you 22 stressed out voice memos that were LENGTHY when you had your own nonsense going on. <3
> 
> Also, all of this is fiction, please use your best judgement and good manners.

It hadn’t been Lovett’s intent to work on porn. He was a nice Jewish boy with big plans and good intentions, but then he’d been in LA writing pilots that got more notes than he knew what to do with, and there’d been a day where his best friend said, “Hey, Lo, you took enough TV production credits to work a lighting rig, right? Please say yes because I might have already said yes for you. I have a friend who says he’s in a crunch tomorrow.”

“Oh, sure,” Lovett said, because that sounded like an interesting way to kill a day and make a small cash sum.

“Fantastic,” Spencer said, very, very quickly. “Also, just to be clear, we’re talking about a porn set.”

“What the fuck,” Lovett said.

“I didn’t sign you up for dental and a two year contract! Just told them I had a buddy who could assist with set lighting.”

“You can volunteer a friend to help someone move. You cannot volunteer them to light well-oiled pecs. You’re probably going to give me some kind of complex.”

“You’re going to see all the bits, actually,” Spencer said, with a frankly insulting eyebrow wiggle.

“Oh great,” Lovett said. “In that case, I’m definitely going to be well on my way to crippling self-doubt.”

Spencer rolled his eyes and pointedly did not look at the grotesque wreckage that Lovett had created around Spencer’s couch, where he’d been staying since he’d moved out to the West Coast—his blanket nest and his pizza boxes, his empty beers and the laundry pile. “You dumbshit,” Spencer said, pulling Lovett close and biting his ear, clinging while Lovett tried to writhe away. “You’re a catch. Fuck porn stars.”

“That’s generally the idea,” Lovett grumbled, which was cheap.

“You’re going to have a great time,” Spencer said. “Making new skills, making friends. I know this.”

The rest was anticlimactic history. The first day was weird, uncomfortable, but Lovett lived his life in that sweet spot of awkwardness and competence, and he told more jokes the higher his anxiety was, so at the end of the day, when the director said, “Can you be back in the morning?” Lovett said yes. He’d been hanging out on Spencer’s couch long enough, flailing and failing to write and running out of the ex-accountant money he’d moved in with.

Six months later, still gainfully employed as someone marginally competent in several behind-the-scenes arenas and quick to google the ones where he wasn’t, he met Favreau on a shoot. Lovett was holding the lighting rig, and Favreau was holding another man’s muscular leg up against his chest, bent at the knee. Lovett did not say, “ _Looking good, Favs,_ ” even though he did, because he had self control and because guys like Jon Favreau were only interested in the attention of men when they were getting paid several hundred dollars an hour.

Afterwards, Favreau, in his fluffy bathrobe, approached Lovett while he was breaking down his setup and said, “Hey, thanks for not blinding me today. I already like you better than the last guy.”

“I’ve got that on my business card, actually,” Lovett said, dryly, but he was charmed, actually, that Jon Favreau — of course he knew who he was, everyone knew who he was — had come by to introduce himself. It was gracious of him. Lovett didn’t generally meet a lot of gracious porn stars.

“Better than the other guy, the Jon Lovett story,” Favreau said, mouth curling.

Maybe Lovett really had read him wrong before. He’d thought of him as too well-polished to have any sense of authenticity, but when he grinned at Lovett, he found himself reevaluating. “And what’s the Jon Favreau story?”

“Too dumb for grad school, too bored to keep writing clickbait, mostly.”

“The perfect body doesn’t hurt. And frankly, the grotesque stamina.”

“Some signposts were there, yes,” Favreau said, scrunching up his face with joy, the expression springing onto his face with gratifying ease and no offense.

“Sorry, I glossed over that other bit. Bored of writing clickbait?”

Favs rolled his eyes. “You’ll never believe the trick this mom used, and this Christmas miracle, and what this dog can do will astound you. At least with porn, I’m living up to people’s expectations.”

“A bold claim,” Lovett laughed, “but I’ll allow it.”

Again, Favreau’s reaction was gratifying. His body went loose with delight, and it was a balm on Lovett’s chapped nerves. Lovett wanted, as he was sure many people did upon meeting Jon Favreau, to keep him. “Listen,” Favreau said, “if you’d ever ghostwritten written meaningless content about proper shoe maintenance, you’d understand.”

Lovett, who had been trying and failing to finish anything, fighting with his own limp brain from Spencer’s couch for months, peered at Favreau’s face, and said, “Deeply unrelatable. I am catching body dysmorphia on well lit porn sets because this is the only job that allows me creative satisfaction. All of my desires to craft a compelling narrative —”

“Easy, killer,” Favreau said, and put his hand up.

Lovett did not, as a general rule, love getting cut off, but he did have a tendency towards tipping into unhinged territory without meaning to, and someone who was going to become an actual friend should have good instincts about when that might happen. “Sorry,” Lovett said. “I didn’t mean to demean your career path.”

Favreau shrugged easily. “It’s honest work, but it could be more compelling.”

“You think so?” Lovett said, and he meant for it to be petty, a joke, but Favreau’s eyes were bright, and somehow it got bent on the way out, and Favreau answered it like an honest question.

“Yeah, no shit. It’s bad sex ed, there’s no sense of character, and no one will let me show the condom rolling.”

“Also,” Lovett said, feeling something shifting in the force, “there are no jokes.”

Jon Favreau, in a large fluffy bathrobe, grinned down at him. He looked golden and well rested, even though Lovett knew he had been physically exhausting himself for four hours. There was, charmingly, a gap between his front teeth. Lovett might have, accidentally, fallen a little bit in love around the second he said, “that’s the worst part!”

*

Finding out that Jon Favreau — who was a gorgeous porn star that Lovett occasionally noticed people recognize and then pretend not to at BW3s — was a truly excellent editor and collaborative partner was a little unexpected.

Even more unexpected was that he had a gorgeous best friend who _also_ acted in porn and with whom he was scripting a romcom. Favs and his friend had even worked together before, which Lovett had seen with his own eyes, after extensive googling and not as a part of the crew. It was certainly illuminating.

“This is because,” Spencer told him on a wine Wednesday, “you are stuck in high school, where it helped to think the cool kids were full of styrofoam.”

By that point, Lovett hadn’t moved out, and he was still working behind the scenes in porn, which was probably a disappointment, but he was forgetting to care, because two nights a week he was workshopping fiction with Favs and Tommy, word counts piling up for the first time since he’d quit his job in accounting to move to LA.

“In high school, they _were_. It used to be easier to tell who was wildly uninteresting, no hidden depths,” Lovett moaned.

“By who was throwing you into the recycling bin and who wasn’t?” Spencer asked.

“There were also the homophobic slurs,” Lovett said, throwing back his glass. “But mostly being attractive. There was definitely an inverse relationship there.”

“Don’t get morose now,” Spencer said, threading his fingers through Lovett’s. “Not when you’ve got two hot boyfriends who happen to be porn stars and nerds. This is some delayed action bullshit.”

“They’re not my boyfriends,” Lovett said, though  he did feel himself perking up. “But they are nerd pornstars and I am their God-king.”

“I spoke this into existence for your life,” Spencer reminded him, glowing.  

 _What about you,_ Lovett wanted to ask, because they’d already discarded the idea that they might be romantically compatible, but Spencer was his best friend, and he wanted everything for him. Lovett might have made fun of the _everything_ Spencer wanted, if he were someone else. Since Spencer was his, Lovett was always burning a candle at the vigil of Spencer getting it: to hit the top of the corporate ladder, a marriage and a mortgage and 2.5 children.

“You did,” Lovett said, pulling up their joined hands to rest his face against them and take a good look at Spencer. “Let’s do you next.”

*

At some point, around the time he was actually considering moving out of Spencer’s one-bedroom, Tommy said, “Lovett, do you know anyone who needs a roommate?”

And Lovett had rolled his eyes over his burrito. “Is this Spencer’s doing?”

Tommy had rolled his eyes, too. “No, fucker,” he said, “but I’d like to move out of my shithole and you do still live on your best friends couch.”

“He’s my high-functioning emotional support best friend with a couch.”

“Why don’t you throw in with Favs?”

Tommy gave him an unimpressed look. “For the same reason you didn’t move back in with your mom after you got tired of being a numbercruncher. You can’t go back. Also, he’s finicky about the bathroom.”

“I’m —” Lovett said, but could not find a mild enough word for how he felt about the cleanliness of the bathroom that did not make him sound homeless.

“You live in squalor,” Tommy said, with a grin. “Which is fine, because I only vacuum when Dan comes into town.”

“Squalor is harsh,” Lovett replied, wondering if he’d miss the couch.

*

It was a weird life, but it was Lovett’s, collecting best friends in his late twenties in a way he never had during high school, working a job that might not have been glamorous or sanitary, but had allowed him to meet people who had sparked his creativity for the first time in a long time. In the words of Jon Favreau, the work could have been more compelling, but the company was great.

And — to be clear, this was what Ghandi was talking about — hanging out with Favreau, who had quickly become Lovett’s favorite audience besides Spencer, he’d been inspired to be the change he wanted to see.

An ex-boyfriend told him once, “You can’t tell jokes during sex.” He wasn’t an ex-boyfriend at the time this  sentence was uttered, but Lovett found that after that, he’d been slightly less attracted to the guy, and shortly thereafter, he’d been demoted.

Lovett wasn’t not proud — he had a fickle heart, and he was ashamed to say that it wasn’t the first or last time someone’s shitty hot take had instantly made his attraction recede. Anyways, the point was, he’d thought: _who decided that?_ And then, immediately answering his own question, he’d thought: porn.

“You think that,” he told Ben, “because there are no good joke writers in porn.”

It seemed like a shame, really, because he’d found Ben handsome an hour before. He thought of Ben when he wrote his first foray into scripted erotica, crafting one character and then another, then establishing a home between them. He wrote married sex: jovial and warm and affectionate and gay, and sent it to Favreau, who was like an editor that could unlock parts of Lovett’s own brain he’d wallpapered over and forgotten about.

Eventually he’d let the porn executive he’d been working under for months see it. He’d laughed in Lovett’s face, and said, “There isn’t any _fucking_ in it, and it’s thirteen pages! Of dialogue.”

“That’s because...” Lovett had started, faltering, and then thought, _no_. “Actually, fuck this.”

He’d thumbed open the group chat, after that, to update Favs, who had been workshopping with him for months, unfailingly charmed by the piece, and Tommy, who Favs preferred to work with when he had his drethers, and who had become in a short period of time also important to Lovett.

 **Lovett** : So Fairchild might have laughed at me and I might have quit  
**Lovett** : Which is fine because obviously I do not give a fuck  
**Lovett** : Except that I am obviously deeply humiliated and require praise for everything I’ve ever done  
**Lovett** : nevermind it’s fine its great fuck porn I did not need to produce this content  
**Tommy** : you done?  
**Lovett** : probably not my life is in shambles and I want a loaf of bread  
**Favs** : who needs fairchild?  
**Lovett** : Obviously not me, as I have just said “fuck this fuck you” and manfully did not cry  
**Favs** : seriously.  
**Lovett** : yes, i seriously need a loaf of bread.  
**Favs** : Seriously I like that script a lot. Tommy and I can act it.  
**Lovett** : You can’t just volunteer Tommy  
**Favs** : He’s here with me.  
**Tommy** : (47527.img)  
**Lovett** : hi boys  
**Tommy** : Favs is right, of course.

It would be stupid for Lovett to even consider it. Idiotic. His life might have taken him in some weird directions, but he wasn’t about to make amateur porn. He said as much, in the group chat.

 **Lovett** : not my life’s calling to make amateur porn.  
**Tommy** : I’m a professional. Jon is a professional. Who tf is an amateur?  
**Favs** : fifty bucks for an llc

That was on a Monday.

There was an agonizing week between the fateful group chat and the decision to actually film porn. Favs was all-in immediately, vaulting past “we should record Lovett’s porn” and straight into “we should be an entire porn production company”. He painted a compelling picture, but that was the problem with Jon Favreau. He could convince you to do all sorts of shit with his stupid gorgeous face, like a colorful frog.

By Wednesday, Lovett had muted the alerts.

 **Lovett** : I’m putting this gc on silent.  
**Favs** : Is tommy there? you live with tommy.  
**Favs** : ping ping ping, tommy is your phone pining and Lovett is hearing it but it isn’t coming from his own phone and it is killing him  
**Favs** : Tommy tell me what his face looks like.  
**Tommy** : (47597.img)  
**Lovett** : fuck off

On Thursday, he avoided the house all day, ate tacos from a truck while parked in his Jeep, and ended up at Spencer’s by mistake, letting himself in with a key he kept forgetting to give back after he moved out.

“Hey, buddy,” Spencer said, looking dubious, as if he was worried that newly unemployed Lovett would move back onto his couch. Which was a fucking ridiculous thing to be worried about, because Lovett was a delightful houseguest. “I’m actually on my way out.”

“ _Now_ now or in that bullshit way you start saying two hours before it’s actually time to leave?” Lovett demanded.

“Somewhere in between?” Spencer hazarded.

“Do you have time to look at my phone?”

“Oh my God,” Spencer said. “It’s finals all over again.”

Lovett curled up in a ball on Spencer’s couch. “Please,” he said, into the cushion. Spencer had compassion for him, because he was a gentle soul.

“You dumb weiner,” Spencer said, and then Lovett could hear him rustling through his bag. He pictured him finding his phone and tapping in the password thoughtlessly. “Shit, dude, you have like, ninety-five missed texts and calls from, oh.”

“Yeah,” Lovett said, having already receded as far as humanly possible into his own hoodie, making himself into an art installation of a medium sized man taking up a very small space.

“I thought things were going well.”

“They are! Maybe! Just filter all the notifications and tell me what I need to know."

“Alright,” Spencer said. Lovett could feel the other end of the couch dip and he tentatively put a foot in his lap, which Spencer allowed without complaint. “Okay. Okay. So, you’ve got some stuff from your mom, all very normal, I pretended to be you and responded, and then your whole group chat with your boyfriends, yes, they seem to be very excited about… Oh.”

There was a pause. Spencer was reading, probably, much further up than he needed to, because Spencer always wanted context and detail. It was what made him the perfect friend to commiserate with, how he kept track of Lovett’s petty interpersonal problems with ease. “Okay, I’m just going to tell them you don’t want to do it.”

“No!” Lovett said, lurching up and for his phone.

“Good gutcheck.” Spencer smirked, holding Lovett’s phone out of reach. “Now why aren’t you texting them back?”

“Because I wrote weird smut,” Lovett said, “and my two stupidly handsome friends want to star in it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m making pudding at midnight.”

Spencer put his hands in Lovett’s hair. Lovett thought about how Spencer was on his way out the door when Lovett arrived, and he thought maybe it wasn’t too early to start thinking about a gift for the holiday season, which should be big and expensive and make a lot of noise.

“Our friendship cannot possibly survive it.”

Spencer blinked at him. “Je ne comprend pas,” he said, which was a phrase he’d found useful during his exchange year at Williams and had brought home with him.

“Come on. My super hot straight friends —”

“I reject this out of hand, already. Didn’t Jon like...have his mouth on some guy’s dick when you met him?”

“Do not be crude! And if you must know, he was engaging in intercourse with another man, yes, but in a professional setting. For money.”

“And then he saw you and it was best-friendship at first sight which, I know, is a tier not a person, blah blah. Anyway, then, he sucks you into his life and you start a biweekly two man writing workshop. He introduces you to his other best friend, and you move in with him. And now they want to start a business with you to act out a fantasy you had and wrote down, with a lot of jokes.”

“When you put it that way,” Lovett said, in a small and miserable voice.

“It sounds insane any way you put it, Spencer said. “Now tell them you’ll do it.”

After Lovett finally said yes, Favs said _YES_ and Tommy renamed the group chat _“crooked dick porn empire”_ , which certainly wasn’t classy.

After that, things move quickly. Tommy and Lovett arrived at Favs’ house one night for takeout and sports to find him on the phone, and it must have been one of his old Buzzfeed friends, because his neck had turned into a noodle and he kept spinning around in his chair.

“Are you bugging Dan?” Tommy said, steering him out of his office and into the den by the back of the chair.

“I am the _light_ of Dan’s _life,_ Tommy,” Favs said, pretending to be annoyed but projecting luminosity instead. His voice invited Dan into the inside of the joke. “Dan loves to hear from me. Also, he says we can use his very swanky apartment as long as we use a cleaning crew that isn’t his usual.”

Lovett hadn’t met Dan yet, but he’d heard of him. Favs seemed to have a lot of respect for him, and they had a long history.

“Maybe the real treasures are the Dans we made along the way,” Lovett said.

“We should invite him to the shareholders meeting,” Favs joked.

“There are no shares. We are doing one very weird thing, and then I’m going to have to find another job or Tommy’s going to have to find a roommate while I go groveling back to my friend, Spencer.”

“We could move Spencer into your bedroom,” Tommy said, looking thoughtful, “and you could sleep on the couch, which you’re very good at. Then we could subsidize Spencer’s rent,and he could keep the bathroom clean.”

“Leave Spencer out of this. I am manifesting him into a deeply romantic life of monogamy this year, because he is a saint and he deserves it.”

Favs, still on the phone, turns to peer at Lovett. Lovett catches his gaze and wants to duck out of it. “Yeah, no, we appreciate it. I know this is a crazy call to take at four-thirty in the afternoon. No, yeah, thanks. I’ll call you.”

*

 **Lovett** : how tf am i supposed to handle  
**Lovett** : oops, neverming  
**Lovett** : wrong thread, gcs fuck me up  
**Tommy** : i was gonna say “how” bc this used to be called the _crooked dick porn empire_ but i see we’re not the three best friends that anyone could have, so, thanks for being basic and messing up lo  
**Favs** : lovett said it was crass and we can’t have porn in the title!!!!!  
**Favs** : what aren’t you handling?  
**Lovett** : nothing, sorry, that was for my gay gc  
**Favs** : why have i not been invited to that?  
**Lovett** : to my _gay group chat?  
_ **Favs** : … nevermind

*

Lovett met Dan at his house, which they were about to film erotic content in.

Dan was tall and broad, and after half an hour of chatting with him, Lovett would have known him without being introduced, because it was obvious from the shared lexicon that he had once been in charge of Favs’ writing.

Dan also had a gorgeous and glittering, sprawling home, and he helped them unload their equipment from Lovett’s jeep.

“Can I ask?” Lovett wanted to know, after everything was set up and Dan still hadn’t excused himself. He honestly hadn’t waited very long, but he was proud of himself for not asking while they were still shaking hands. “How does someone call up their old boss and ask them if they can use their house for porn-filming purposes? What is the small talk lead up like before a question like that? Did he have to start at the beginning?”

“Well,” Dan said, looking simultaneously amused and taken aback, a reaction which Lovett got a lot. “I was there at the beginning, so there was no need.”

“Did you discover Favs?” Lovett asked.

Favs rolled his eyes, pink. “Insomuch as Dan was the first person to find out that I was much better at being a slutty pool boy than writing bait and switch Facebook content, sure.”

Dan reached over to clap Favs behind the neck and shared a conspiratorial look with Lovett. “He thinks if he pretends to be dancing through life enough we’ll all believe him and forget that he’s brilliant.”

Favs went pink to the tips of his gorgeous ears, and Lovett thought that was as good a lead up as any.

*

Lovett, having seen Favs in action in person — more than once — and Tommy on redtube.com, thought he might be prepared. He had two gorgeous friends with lithe, well-sculpted bodies, and they were only going to act out a scripted fantasy that he’d written in the dark, eating bag after bag of popcorn. They were only going to touch each other’s faces tenderly while he held a camera.

“Hey Tommy,” Favs said, and Lovett was in the best possible angle to see how sweet he looked, chin tilted down so he could look up through his eyelashes. “You ready for this?”

Tommy leaned down and kissed him in answer, a kiss Lovett was a little shocked to see. Obvious affection and practice, a quick reassurance. “Ready when you are,” Tommy said, when he pulled away, but not far.

“You can’t possibly already be going off script,” Lovett said, playing for exasperation and shoving down everything else.

“Sorry, sorry,” Tommy said, turning his gaze on Lovett, which also made him feel squirmy, too-warm, as he gave him a wink, “Just checking in with my costar.”

Lovett swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

 _Fellas,_ he thought to himself, adjusting his grip on the camera, _is it gay to look tenderly into your buddies eyes?_.

There was a lot of acting involved. Lovett, hand on his heart, had not been sure it was going to work until he saw Favs turn the full weight of his gaze onto Tommy, and saw Tommy feed back into him, perfect and glowing.

There were things he hadn’t been sure about: pet names coming out of Tommy’s mouth, for one, but when he said, _that’s right, sweetheart,_ Lovett bought it.

By the time Favs was touching Tommy’s chest, peeling him out of his shirt with reverent hands, and lipping at Tommy’s wrist, Lovett wasn’t sure he was going to survive. By the time Tommy was sliding a water-based lubricant between Favs’ thighs with generous, soft hands, Lovett’s soul had left his body.   

*

By the time Lovett got to put his elbows on the table of Kara Swisher’s studio and explain that _Crooked Media_ started with one rejected spec script that he’d written, chatty and affectionate, and a fateful group chat where his two handsome best friends had a can-do attitude, he’d already been practicing the _Jon Lovett story_ for half a year. Although, somewhere along the way, the Jon Lovett story had turned into the Lovett Favreau Wong Vietor Pfeiffer story.

“That first film, that was a Lovett and Favreau joint, right?”

“The writing? Yeah,” Lovett said, holding his almost comically large mug of hot tea between his sweater paws. “And the second.”

“Were those the only two you made on your own?”

“With just the three of us, yes. But we went group chat to twenty two employees over the course of about fourteen months.”

“Right! That first one flew under the radar, but by the fourth or fifth video, that was when you were starting to get attention, right?”

“Yeah, for sure. Things snowballed after that. Around the time that people realized that Jon and Tommy were maintaining character and narrative continuity, people were starting to wonder what the deal was. They’re both attractive guys, and people were into it for a couple reasons.”

“Most notably, I’ve seen the humor cited, but also the longevity of the actor pairings, or the ongoing narrative.”

“Oh man,” Lovett said, rubbing his hands together. “You have to know, that’s Favs’ pet issue. The first time I met him, actually, was on a set. e went out for drinks afterwards, and he was like… working on a pitcher of Sam Adams and just really going on and on about how he never gets to put a condom on while the camera is rolling and how it made him so angry. It actually wasn’t very long before we were fucking around with our imaginary porn company, just me and him and Tommy, who he introduced me to. We’d always talk about what we’d do in our imaginary porn.”

“In what ways had porn let you down? What was the common consensus between you?”

“For me, it was just so narrow. I know porn isn’t a stand in for sex ed, but sometimes, as a queer teenager, it ends up filling that space. Watching porn as a teenager, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be sexually active because the narrative of gay porn is that there’s one kind of sex to have and it’s the only kind that counts. I would watch it, and it would interest my libido, visually, but then afterwards, miserable, I’d think: I don’t know if being gay is for me. Which was a bummer, because the other options seemed even less for me. It certainly added to my Gay Delay. I didn’t really fool around until college, where I was lucky enough to make a friend who was running on something like the same timeline.”

“And what of your other founders — Vietor, Favreau, Pfieffer? Do they have similar stories?”

“In terms of dissatisfaction with porn, probably. We actually came at Dan sideways. He’d just been doing us a favor, in terms of letting us use his property as a set, and then he happened to be in the office dropping off a camera rig we’d left behind when we were doing a livestream, just taking questions from the comments, and he was really thoughtful, and people wanted him back.”

“I’ve seen the streams, and now you guys do a full podcast. How long have you been doing the streams?”

“From pretty early on, actually! I think there was some sense of authenticity that people watching Crooked content were craving, and we’d get these really honest, vulnerable questions. A lot of people reached out. We heard from a lot of women who had some really touching stories, which we’d naively not expected to be our core demographic. But they’d say things like, I watched _Sunflower Afternoon_ with my boyfriend and when, you know, Tommy’s character Dylan checks in with Favs to make sure he’s still into it, I cried.”

“Yikes!”

“No, we get that a lot. And sex doesn’t live by itself in a dirty cave, it’s a part of a fuller life — no tea, asexuals, you know I love you very much and we have a whole series called Intimates where we explore a few of our core characters in intimate activity that isn’t orgasm-seeking. Wait, I got sidetracked! All I meant was, we shove sex away from romance and humor and grief and compassion. And we wanted to tell a fuller story, and we wanted characters that could talk about other things, make jokes, be silly, have sex that was different without that being code for, you know, more and more extreme. That first script Favs and I wrote, I knew that was going to be about intercrural. Intercrural. Inter — fuck.”

She laughed. “We could save the notes for the end.”

“No, damn it. Intercrural. Nailed it. In your face.”

“In the thighs, actually.”

“Ha! Point being, I tried to shop it to the studio Favs was working almost exclusively with at that point, and that was a whole thing. Why are there so many fucking jokes and nobody fucks anybody? He was kind of screaming it. And I was like. Listen, have you met Jon Favreau? He’s going to look so pretty on his back, getting frotted with. Not to get too blue.”

“You are on my show to talk about your porn empire.”

“Right! And I appreciate it. Shall we talk about the podcast? Or perhaps the Farrow piece?”

“Sure. Either. Both. Which one?”

“Sorry, that was faulty journalism. I just like your direction.”

“Listen. Perpetual motion has nothing on letting a New York gay talk about himself.”

“I appreciate it. Tell us how PWP got started, because I think you’ve already alluded to it.”

“Oh, right, the livestreams. So pretty shortly after we’d gone viral that first time, because the third or fourth video starts with, like, Tommy’s character getting a promotion he’d worked really hard for, and Favs spins him around, and somebody clipped it as a joke about gay porn, but people actually found it really charming so that kind of backfired. Anyways, we got a social media manager before we hired any other in-house writers or actors, and she’s brilliant. She had us answering all these questions, and we were doing a livestream, and actually, you might have seen this one, too, but like. There’s a pretty interesting moment that makes me look like a fucking idiot now.”  

“The one where you discover that your best friends and co-founders aren’t straight?”

“The very same.”

“That video is frequently speculated to be a hoax.”

“It isn’t. It was not my finest hour.”

“You had literally seen them have sex. You had filmed them having sex. I’m not speculating on the authenticity, but if you ever see the video where Favreau calls Tommy his ex, that’s what the comments are full of.”

“You have to understand, I’d worked on a lot of porn sets, and neither of them really set off my real-gay whiskers.”

“You thought they might be —”

“Gay for pay. Or like, the kind of straight bros who hook up. It’s hard to explain how I could have missed it, in retrospect, but to be clear, my track record is pretty good in terms of, you know, guys I’ve suspected of being gay at an hourly rate only. I certainly didn’t think they’d ever been boyfriends.”

“Alright. And your co-founders. Are they...friendly exes?”

“Well. We do own a media company together, so it seems to be going okay.”

“True. So the podcast sprang out of the livestream, because we were answering all of these questions about sex and love and, you know, anything people were asking about in the mailbag, and then we were recording them and we were halfway to a podcast. We split it up the way we do for scheduling purposes, because Dan and his husband are busy guys, and then from the podcast it was a short jump to the audio erotica we started selling, because people would tell us that they aren’t really into porn but that they’ll turn crooked videos on just for the sound, so all of the sudden we were packaging these five ten minute audios, chatty and sexy, and then in November, our social media manager, who now is really in charge of marketing, she's a goddess, she told us we needed to be letting the writing staff do — ”

*

 **Lovett** : So then I told her it was strictly off the record and she couldn’t have any of the interview, so expect a lot of your personal details to be everywhere quoted from a source familiar with their dicks  
**Tommy** : that could literally be anyone  
**Lovett** : inflated numbers  
**Lovett** : inflated something  
**Lovett** : idk mostly i just forgot to brag about having two boyfriends so that was a bummer  
**Favs** : are you sure because like. you bring it up kind of a lot for someone who doesn't want to be out poly media moguls  
**Tommy** : also I am like 55 percent positive hat if your new best friend made you tea while you were in her studio you did your spiel   
**Tommy** : about that clip  
**Favs** : you do love being right  
**Lovett** : WAIT  
**Lovett** : I DID NOT EVEN THOUGH I DESERVED TO  
**Lovett** : HOW THE FUCK DID YOU NOT KNOW YOU WERE DATING TOMMY  
**Lovett** : EVERYTHING I SAID ABOUT YOU WHEN I THOUGHT YOU WERE STRAIGHT WAS BASICALLY TRUE  
**Lovett** : YOU NEEDED ME TO GET YOU TOGETHER. AND THEN TO BE IN THE MIDDLE  
**Tommy** : naw, too pent up. didn't get a chance to release that valve fifteen minutes ago.  
**Favs** : good job. we're proud of you. :)   
**Favs** : also no worries. she'll call you back after someone downloads the instagram stories from the christmas party. you were not subtle. 

*

 **priari** : who wants to help me write a library story?? jesse/taylor??  
**priari** : meet me in the #ffmeetcutes channel  
**priari** : not to call anyone out but (travis) be there or be square (travis)


	2. the coda where tommy jon and jon get together onscreen, sort of

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the coda Sev deserved from the start. sorry about the delay. I was hopeful until the buzzer that the Other AU was going to land.

“The next question comes from an anonymous user who wants to know if you guys would ever consider taking back an ex,” Priyanka said, tilting her head to talk over her monitor.

“I have a no take-backs policy, personally,” Lovett answered, right out of the gate. “It’s like the five second rule. If it doesn’t happen right after it gets dropped, that’s it. It’s garbage, it has cat hair on it.” 

“Harsh,” Tommy said, forehead folding. 

“Right!” Favs laughed. “No fury like a Lovett scorned, huh Tommy?”

“A real salt the earth policy. I think what it boils down to is why you broke up. Did you break up because one of you went to grad school and you weren’t prepared to go the distance? Because if the first break up was respectful and you’re both thinking about each other — why not? Otherwise, remind yourself of the reasons you broke up and how you were feeling at the end of the relationship.”

Favs opened his mouth and no sound came out. Lovett jumped in to save him. “Also, horniness is temporary! The emotional quicksand of fucking around with an ex because of horniness is much more lasting!” 

“Right!” Tommy said. “That’s a good rule of thumb, actually. If you’re lonely and thinking of an ex, go have dinner with a friend before you text you ex. If you’re horny and thinking of your ex, well.”

Lovett made a rapid fire rec-list, counting off on his fingers as he listed them, “Sunflower afternoon! The one where everyone is sexy-mean to Travis on his last day of work as a going away present! Graduation day! Watch any of those and engage in some fucking self-care! Or some self care fucking! But not with the ex in question!”

“Also, the stuff about numbers - the amount of sexual partners you’ve had. It’s gross, it’s nonsense. You should always be safe and you should be thoughtful with your partners, but I feel like a lot of people thinking about going back with exes has to do with, you know, not leveling up, which is not a useful way to conduct yourself. You don’t keep track of how many kinds of sandwiches you have, and you should never have sex with an ex just because you’ve already had that kind of sandwich, so it doesn’t count.”  

“That’s dumb. Clearly an invention of the straights. No offence, lads.”

Tommy and Favs shared a look. After a beat, Tommy leaned back into his mic. “Sorry, anonymous. Once again, Lovett’s biphobia rears its head. I promise at Crooked Media  _ are  _ working on him, it’s just slow work.”

“What,” Lovett said, feeling like he’d just fallen out of his chair. 

Tommy rolled his eyes, peering at camera two. “The amount of times I’ve been called straight when Lovett literally founded a company with two exes is mind boggling.”

“With...” Lovett said, feeling confused, and hurt. “You’re fucking with me.”

On one side of Lovett, Tommy had fallen silent. On the other, Favs turned red. “Lovett,” he said. And then, “Pri, if you don’t mind.”

Priyanka cut the stream.  

*

“It just  _ didn’t come up!  _ What a load of  _ shit, _ ” Lovett was venting, about three seconds after all of the non-founding members of the Crooked empire had left the room. He pointed an accusing finger at Favs. “You! Fucking introduced him to me. You have to meet my friend Tommy,” he said, voice dripping with mockery. 

Favs winced. “I can explain.”

“Explain that you introduced me to your ex boyfriend and didn’t say a fucking word about it?”

“Probably twice,” Tommy said, snorting, before looking immediately contrite. “Sorry.”

“What?” Lovett yelped, as Favs blurted, “He’s not an ex, Tommy what the fuck!” 

“And  _ you.  _ I  _ live  _ with you.”

“I’m a little confused as to why we’re in trouble. I definitely feel like it was obvious.” Tommy said, putting a hand on the back of his neck. “I told you when I tried to get you as a roommate that I’d lived with Jon before.  _ And  _ you’ve literally filmed us having sex.”

“Coworkers! And best friends!” Lovett cried. 

Favs face was still stained dark. “Both true,” he croaked. 

“Shut up,” Lovett said, and then faltered, because Favs looked. Distressed. A little shattered. He turned his body towards him, and made a conscious effort to unfurl his posture. 

“Can we have a parlay?” Favs croaked. 

After a long pause, Lovett nodded stiffly, and Favs took a deep breath. Lovett and Tommy were both looking at him, and the snapchat filter in Lovett’s head filled in little frizzy lines between the two of them, like it had been doing since he’d learned that they used to date. His brain couldn’t stop shouting about it.  

“Lovett. I used to date Tommy.”

Lovett crossed his arms again, against his will. He just needed to feel some kind of pressure around his chest, which he thought might cave in any moment now. “And I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel weird in case you hit it off. I  _ definitely  _ didn’t think it needed to be said that I’m bi, because, like Tommy said, you literally met me filming gay porn, and you’ve held the camera —” 

Suddenly, Lovett was not the only source of outrage in the room. “Jon, you could have warned me, said something, shit.” 

“In case Tommy and I  _ hit it off, _ ” Lovett said, voice going shrill. “We should not be — what the fuck — sorry, we shouldn’t be doing this here.” They were more or less soundproofed, in the recording office, but still, Lovett could feel his heartbeat in his tongue, and the impropriety of what was happening just doors away from their employees. 

“I need to retire to the fainting couch.” Tommy said. 

“That’s my line,” Lovett bit out. “I’m the one who. God, this is such a mess. Also, I’m going to need someone to circle back and tell me who Favs’ other ex is.”

Tommy and Favs spoke over each other again, in a loud burst. “Pardon?” Lovett asked, but they were both quiet.

“I think it’s time for a time out. I’m going to take a drive,” he told them.

“Lovett, it’s 12:30 in LA. Being on the road isn’t exactly about to clear your head,” Tommy said, dubious.

“I’m going to  _ tweet  _ in my car for an hour, then, fuck! I just — I need to go.”

*

Lovett knew he’d probably been fucking around too long when his phone chirped and he saw Favs name and picture of him, blurred around the edges, taken from sometime after they’d met but before Lovett moved in with Tommy.

**Favs** : Lovett  
**Favs** : i want to say some stuff. do you want to put on dnd and take the afternoon off??? Spencer can filter your messages later.  
**Lovett** : I don’t need Spencer to read your texts, asshole  
**Lovett** : if you want to talk to me come sit in the car and come out in the passenger seat  
**Favs** : like god intended lol  
**Lovett** : amen

Favs presence fills up Lovett’s entire car. “I’m sorry I was a dick,” Lovett told him. “Your dating history isn’t any of my business. Neither is your sexuality, and I’m. Embarrassed that I acted just like everyone I ever came out to in college who was pissed I wasn’t out to them earlier.”

“But it’s not about that, is it?” Favs asked. Lovett flicked his gaze over to him. He had pinned his palms between his knees. 

“No,” Lovett said. He looked back out through the windshield like he had to focus on the road. “It’s not.” 

“I didn’t mean to be dishonest,” Favs said, with finality. As if that was enough to cover it all, meeting and becoming friends with Lovett, introducing him to Tommy, starting a fucking  _ porn empire  _ with him. Lovett flicked his gaze sideways, trying not to move his head. The side of Jon’s face was soft, unguarded. Maybe — maybe it was. 

“It’s okay,” Lovett said, and touched the side of his hand with careful fingertips. “In there, that wasn’t my finest hour.”

Favs twists his hand until he meets Lovett’s, palm to palm. Lovett allows it. Lovett might even encourage it, adjusting for the best fit and curling his fingers around Favs’ as well. 

“Can I ask — ” Lovett says, faltering. 

“Anything,” Favs said. 

Lovett thinks he is about to be wildly inappropriate, but what else is new. “Why did you and Tommy break up?”

“Ah,” Favs said, “Well. I went off to grad school. Tommy got into porn. One of those things stuck.” 

“Fuck,” Lovett said. 

“Fuck,” Favs agreed, smiling a little. “Then I followed him out west and lived on his couch for a few months like a loser, and then, I ended up at it, too.”

“Did you guys — during?” Lovett asks, incoherent. The picture is so blurry. Lovett wishes he had been there. He wants every detail. 

“No,” Favs said. “I thought, once, but then we didn’t, and then it seemed skeevy, like I thought working in porn would make it okay to come on to him.” 

“That’s stupid,” Lovett said, wondering if Tommy had felt the same way, trying to imagine a younger Tommy, who’d had an ex in his home that he’d admittedly parted on good terms with. “And he was probably thinking the same thing, but in idiot reverse.” 

“Maybe,” Favs said, and picked up their joined hands, steering Lovett’s knuckles to press against his hot eyelid, and then across the bridge of his nose. “But then he dated other people, and me too, and now we’re best friends. I did kind of think that he’d be into you.”

Lovett only has these conversations in cars, but he prefers to be driving them. It’s easy, then, to only flick occasional glances if he doesn’t want to see, if he needs to protect himself from someone else’s expressions. With nothing running but the radio, down so low it barely registers, Lovett turns his head fully. 

“Why did you think that?” Lovett asked, trying for lightness. “I mean. Besides the obvious reasons of me being, you know, a blinding wit and reasonably handsome.” 

“Those things,” Favs said, with big earnest eyes. He and Lovett are still holding hands. “And just. Everything he was ever into with exes. With me. I just thought you were kind of his type after I got to know you. All the stuff we had in common.”

“All the,” Lovett spluttered. “You thought I might be Tommy’s type because you and I met on a job and found out we’re… drift compatible when we’re talking about porn?” 

Favs goes red. Not a smiling flush, but like Lovett’s really humiliated him. Lovett takes a deep breath, tries to drag it down to his toes, because that’s not what he wants, never. “That’s deeply flattering. Consider me properly flattered.”

“Good,” Favs said. “Do you want to … go back inside now? To our office? Where the things are?”

“Five more minutes,” Lovett said, resting the right side of his face on the headrest, just looking. 

“Okay,” Favs said looking back at him with wide eyes. It comes out a whisper. 

*

**Lovett** : he went to grad school  
**Tommy** : it slipped out  
**Lovett** : you’d get back with him  
**Tommy** : it’s complicated  
**Lovett** : is it?  
**Tommy** : Go back 2 work. new content goes out every monday and thursday with or without office interpersonal shit

*

It’s like a Magic Eye. Now that Lovett’s seen it, he can’t uncross his eyes. There is evidence everywhere. It was only obscured by the fact that Lovett was a fucking idiot. It was obvious now that there was a reason and a shared history. To be fair, Lovett knew plenty of people he’d witnessed having sex with his own two eyes that did  _ not  _ have a long and illustrious history with each other. 

The strain of  _ not  _ talking about it almost makes Lovett pop a blood vessel in his eye. The sit in their shared office and he wants to shout, “Are you guys still in love?” like an unhinged person. 

Lovett contains himself, but just barely. Dan drives in instead of calling in for the Thursday pod with Favs and they talk about safe kink and then talk to an expert about being critical engagement with kink from an intersectional perspective, and Lovett tries to read Dan’s mind about what he knows. 

Dan, as usual, does not respond to Lovett’s attempted telepathy, although he does give Lovett several meaningful looks throughout the recording, which is also par for the course. The main issue with Dan is that he always reacts with  _ just enough  _ preemptive content that Lovett is never sure how far into the future Dan can see. It’s infuriating. 

“Dan,” he called, when Dan walks into a conference room Lovett had been sitting in alone, calling out to him with his mind. He didn’t even look up, because Dan has a very distinctive footfall. “You’re for sure gay, right?”

Dan laughs a startled sound. That’s distinctive, too. “Excuse me?” 

“You know. Just checking because apparently I’m a fucking idiot and I’ve been getting some weird surprises.”

“Yeah, Lovett,” Dan said. “I’m for sure gay. If you know any other  _ for sure  _ gays who are ready to put away their wild ways and watch Westwood on my couch, feel free to let me know.” 

“I hope that isn’t a joke,” Lovett said, an unholy light catching in his heart. “Because I just might.”

*

**Lovett** : What the fuck is this  
**Lovett** : I leave for the weekend and favs has a whole gdoc full of  
**Lovett** : threesomes??? like he doesn’t recognize the sanctity of dylan and lukas’ VOWS  
**Lovett** : wow guys  
**Tommy** : you done?  
**Lovett** : you always ask me this  
**Lovett** : you should know by now that the answer is no  
**Favs** : i wrote it  
**Tommy** : i helped  
**Tommy** : also are you gonna, like. come into Contraception so we can talk. u are literally in the building  
**Lovett** : what is the point of having teacher workdays if we can’t spread out in the office ????

Lovett tapped out his last response but then acquiesced, leaving his computer in Abstinence. 

“This Henry character is a unique bird,” Lovett said, moving from foot to foot in the doorway of Contraception. 

“He’d have to be,” Favs said. 

Tommy was smiling a little bit, but he was serious beneath that. 

“Your storyline is a fan favorite,” he said. “I’m all about a good poly plot, but... ”

“But the fans would riot if it wasn’t something serious,” Favs said. 

“I mean. You’d for sure have to cast him and he’d have to be stellar with you guys. And you’d have to keep him long term. You guys make so much content.”

“We thought,” Tommy said, careful, “that this might go into the private vault.”

“Into the...” Lovett said, and Lovett is many things, but he isn’t a fucking idiot. His heart, unruly, leaves its post.    
  
“We don’t want to fuck anything up. Meeting you, starting this company, this past year — all incredible.” 

“But,” Lovett croaked. 

“This could be something else for that list,” Favs said. 

“But, you guys,” Lovett said. 

“That too,” Favs said. Lovett — aside from the sheer shock of the  _ other  _ thing, the thing where they both seemed to be looking at him, fondly, and beseechingly — was suddenly overjoyed for them. 

Favs looked unsure. “This is incredible!” Lovett said, to wipe that fucking look off of Favs’ face. He wanted to climb up on the conference table. He wanted to facetime his mom, who would have no idea what was going on but who could generally be relied on to respond appropriately when Lovett wanted her to be happy for him. “My two handsome boys! Finally figuring it out! Rosebud was his sled all along! This hotel has been closed for forty years! I am losing the plot but I am fucking happy for you!” 

Tommy asked, “Are you done?”

Lovett nodded. 

Tommy said, “Can Jon or I kiss you, and, addendum, to clarify, if you don’t want to date one or both of us because Jon and I are kind of susceptible to … I don’t know. Imprinting?”

Lovett stared at him, thinking, but you — and Tommy must have seen it on his face. “Oh, fuck off. That’s a job. Acting.” 

“Yes, of course,” Lovett said. “Um. To all of it.”

“Eloquent,” Favs said, but he glowed a bit while he said it. 

“Come here,” Lovett demanded, and Favs did. 

“Let me,” Lovett said. 

“I am letting you,” Favs said. 

“Shh,” Lovett said, which he recognized was hypocritical of him. He’d wanted to do this, pictured it, but the reality of Favs, heft and breath and the warm expanse of his chest giving off faint waves of body heat even before they had touched — Lovett wasn’t prepared. Favs tilted his head down, which was the way it always went, but he also reached down and brushed his thumb across Lovett’s bottom lip, which was new. Lovett felt his eyelids fall closed before Favs mouth was against his, soft and warm and dry, and then he skimmed his tongue across Lovett’s lower lip. 

Lovett made a punched-out noise on accident, before he could stop himself. 

“Oh,” he said. Favs was too close, Lovett couldn’t see anything else. 

“Wow,” Tommy said. 

“Put me in the game, coach,” Lovett said in his Tommy voice. It wasn’t perfect; Lovett wasn’t a voice actor, but it got the job done. Tommy moved like water, fluid, in the most direct route to Lovett. 

“Lovett,” he said, with a raspy edge. 

“The very same,” he said, and thought,  _ this isn’t real, Lovett. Make the most of it.  _

Lovett had been weird in high school, probably too weird to have gotten a date even if he’d been out then, and then he’d had gay delay, besides the experimentation he’d done with Spencer, which had included a virginity pact that, looking back, Lovett was boundlessly grateful for. All of that to say: Lovett had never actually kissed two people in rapid succession. He’d never been able to catalogue in stark contrast. 

Tommy peppered Lovett’s mouth with smacking kisses that made him laugh before delving in, and ended with one hand grasping his waist. Lovett liked it a lot. When he pulled back, feeling blurry and exhilarated, he noticed that Tommy and Favs were holding hands, which, somehow, was the thing that got Lovett. 

“Are you crying,” Favs said, sounding panicked. 

“No,” Lovett said, swiping at his eyes. 

“Not exactly what Tommy and I were hoping for.” 

“Sorry,” Lovett said, still patting at his face with the wrist of his long sleeve shirt. “It’s been a wild ride.” 

Tommy reeled him in with forearms that Lovett had only really admired from afar, and never from the privileged position of being  _ inside  _ the arms. It was a remarkable difference. Tommy dropped a single, soft kiss on the top of his head. “You’re telling me.”

Lovett used his elbows to get some leverage, pushing against Tommy and ignoring his  _ oof.  _ “Wait, you  _ actually  _ have to tell me,” Lovett said. “How did you two…” 

“Let’s take the rest of the day,” Favs suggested. “And start with a pretzel.” 

“A pretzel and then we’ll mine your decade of unresolved sexual tension for content,” Lovett said. He loved pretzels and a good, juicy story. “Did you guys have off-camera sex about it already?” 

“The  _ private vault, _ ” Tommy said, pink. “This content is not for the general public.” 

Lovett was not a member of the general public. Lovett was practically a VIP, which was why he was allowed to reach down and take Tommy’s hand. Favs watched it happen with sharp eyes. “I would hold your hand, too,” he told him, “but I worry you two would find it funny to try and swing me.” 

“I promise,” Favs said, looking timid.

Lovett snorted. “I’m not actually short enough to swing, dumbass,” he said, and let Favs take his other hand. It’s stupid, an impractical way to get anywhere, but here, in the office, in the middle of this place they built together, it’s nice. Lovett doesn’t say,  _ VIP, bitches,  _ but he’s thinking it loudly. Dan probably knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> codas I would like to see but not write, myself:  
> \- when jon and tommy got together while lovett was out of town for the weekend  
> \- the year that favs was dan's hot poolboy  
> \- the investigative undercover op ronan farrow does when he wants to expose the abuses in the porn industry because this cute quirky wholesome instagram content can't be the whole story. surprise, they've got clothespins about how you want to be approached and lots o rules.  
> \- slack content of the porn empire


End file.
